Intelligence veterans blast Tom Cotton as pro-torture, 'partisan,' and 'wholly unfit' to lead the CIA

President Donald Trump is weighing a national security
shakeup that could involve replacing CIA Director Mike Pompeo
with Arkansas Sen.Tom Cotton.

Several CIA veterans reacted with alarm to the news on
Thursday, characterizing Cotton as too partisan and
inexperienced to lead the agency and expressing concern over
his views on torture.

"It is bothersome that, so far as one can tell, he
knows absolutely nothing about the intelligence community," one
former CIA official said.

Several CIA veterans reacted with alarm on Thursday to news that
Republican Sen. Tom Cotton could replace Mike Pompeo as head of
the intelligence agency within the next two months.

It is unclear whether Cotton, a combat veteran and Senate
freshman, would accept the position if nominated by President
Donald Trump. Cotton's spokesman said on Thursday that his "focus
is on serving Arkansans in the Senate.”

But Trump's chief of staff John Kelly is reportedly spearheading
a national security shake-up that would involve installing Pompeo
as secretary of state and Cotton as CIA director. Rex Tillerson,
whose leadership of the State Department has been criticized by
both career department employees and the president, would be
ousted.

"This is an awful appointment," said Paul Pillar, a 28-year
veteran of the CIA, of Cotton's potential nomination. "Sen.Cotton
is a highly ideological individual who is not well-suited to lead
an agency part of whose core mission is objective analysis."

Pillar pointed to a letter Cotton wrote to top
Iranian leaders in March 2015 warning them against striking a
nuclear deal with then-President Barack Obama. The letter was
signed by 47 Senate Republicans and infuriated the White House,
which viewed it as an inappropriate congressional intervention in
sensitive diplomatic negotiations.

"We will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear weapons
program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than
an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah
Khamenei," the letter read.

"It's hard to imagine someone who would do something like that,
something so contrary to accepted foreign policy procedure,
providing objective leadership on issues related to Iran," Pillar
said.

Former CIA analyst Ned Price, who served as a National Security
Council spokesman under Obama, shared concerns over the future of
the US's relationship with Iran if placed in the hands of Pompeo
at the State Department and Cotton at the CIA.

"I certainly think Cotton will continue much of what Pompeo
started," Price said, referring to a common perception of
Pompeo's CIA leadership as partisan and motivated, at least in
part, by loyalty to Trump.

"And with these two at the helm of these institutions, it's much
more likely that we'll find ourselves moving towards regime
change with Iran," Price added. "The Iran deal is toast — that's
a given — but the march to war will become much more viable. It's
something they've coordinated on even in their current posts, and
it surely will pick up if this comes to pass."

As the New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin noted in a lengthy profile of Cotton
published earlier this month, undermining the Iran nuclear deal
in an attempt to wholly dismantle it has been a touchstone of
Cotton's young Senate career. (He was elected in 2015.)

"I told the President in July that he shouldn't certify that Iran
was complying with the agreement,” Cotton told Toobin. "Putting
aside the issue of technical compliance or noncompliance, it's
clear that the agreement is not in our national interest."

Lack of experience working in intelligence

Beyond Cotton's position on the Iran deal, however, some CIA
veterans are nervous about his lack of experience working with
the intelligence community.

"He seems bright enough," said former CIA counsel Bob
Deitz. "He went to my favorite law school. But it is bothersome
that, so far as one can tell, he knows absolutely nothing about
the intelligence community. The CIA is not an easy agency to lead
because of its varied missions. Of course he may be a quick
learner. I hope that is true."

While serving in the Army in 2006, Cotton wrote a letter to three New York
Times reporters who broke a story about a classified program
run by the CIA and the Treasury Department that tracked the
financing of terror networks. He told the reporters that they
should be in jail for publishing the details of the program.

"Having graduated from Harvard Law and practiced with a federal
appellate judge and two Washington law firms before becoming an
infantry officer, I am well-versed in the espionage laws relevant
to this story and others — laws you have plainly violated,"
Cotton wrote. "By the time we return home, maybe you will be in
your rightful place: not at the Pulitzer announcements, but
behind bars."

Former congressional intelligence staffer Mieke Eoyang, now the
vice president for the national security program at the think
tank Third Way, said on Twitter that one upside to Cotton running
the CIA is that he would be forced to suppress his partisan
outbursts.

"He'd stop organizing counterproductive Senate letters. He'd have
to shut up about his successes. He'd have to take the hit for any
intelligence failures," Eoyang said. She added that
"classified information restrictions limit what he can say/do."

Controversial views on torture

Others, like longtime CIA intelligence officer Glenn Carle, are
concerned about Cotton's views on torture. Cotton told CNN last
November that "waterboarding isn't torture," arguing that "Donald
Trump is a pretty tough guy and he's ready to make those tough
calls" when it comes to the use of controversial and extreme
interrogation methods.

In 2015, Cotton said that
"the only problem with Guantánamo Bay is there are too
many empty beds and cells there right now."

"We should be sending more terrorists there," Cotton said in
reference to the infamous detention facility. "As far as I'm
concerned, every last one of them can rot in hell. But as long as
they can't do that, they can rot in Guantánamo Bay."

Carle, who wrote a book about his involvement in the
interrogation of a man believed in the early 2000's to be a top
Al-Qaeda member, said that Cotton is "wholly unfit" to be CIA
director.

"It will be difficult" for the CIA's career employees
"to work under someone who is a zealot and thinks
that torture is not torture," Carle said. "Cotton is an
ideologue and a partisan, and his views are not only out of the
mainstream — they challenge tenets of our core American values."